One of the bad consequences of our subsidization of higher education is credential inflation — the tendency for employers to insist that applicants have college degrees even for jobs where no particular knowledge or skills taught only in college were necessary. With the labor market flooded with college grads, it was easy for firms and government agencies to say that only degree holders would be considered.
That trend stopped a few years ago, and a number of employers said that they were going to embrace skills-based hiring rather than demanding dubious college credentials. But as Sophia Damian observes in today’s Martin Center article, that seems to be moving rather slowly.
She writes:
With such benefits associated with skills-based hiring, one would expect the majority of companies to rush to adopt this hiring process. Yet the Harvard/BGI report suggests otherwise. Of the firms studied, only 37 percent actively embraced skills-based hiring. These firms, ranging from small businesses to Apple, hired an average of 18 percent more non-degree employees into positions. By contrast, 45 percent of surveyed firms made “a change in name only, with no meaningful difference in actual hiring behavior” after removing degree requirements. Another 18 percent of firms were deemed “backsliders”: While they initially eliminated degree requirements and hired several non-degree workers, they eventually “relapsed” and ended up hiring fewer workers without degrees.
Read the whole thing.